196 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



the end by the contest with their rivals in the open. But 

 these considerations have weight only when we conceive 

 the social order as a stage or a process of development, and 

 that a development of a spiritual or rational kind. If it 

 were merely a question of realising immediate good as it 

 appears to us, coercion would always be in place. Liberty 

 has its value only in a far longer game. 



(5) Now modern thought, as has been said, is concerned 

 with the idea of liberty from the first, but its implications 

 only emerge by degrees. The general problem of modern 

 ethics is to bring spiritual truth into relation with the actual 

 conditions of the development of humanity. In terms of 

 social philosophy this is to achieve the synthesis of freedom 

 and social co-operation, and in the effort to do so we may 

 distinguish three main phases, the first centring on the con- 

 ception of Nature, the second on that of Happiness, and 

 the third on that of Development. 



The idea of Nature descended from antiquity, but, like 

 all ancient ideas, it changed its concrete meaning with time. 

 Nature meant for the eighteenth century philosopher that 

 which would remain if human institutions were in idea 

 swept away. Into this conception he unwittingly imported 

 his own highly developed ideas of right and justice, and 

 the human individual was conceived as seized of rights 

 and possessed of moral qualities which are in reality the 

 outcome of social history. There was in consequence a 

 blending of truth and falsity in the conception. It was 

 true in so far as it conceived human nature as larger in its 

 potentialities than anything which the social fabric had 

 expressed. It was true in so far as it conceived the indi- 

 vidual as subject to a higher court of appeal than the judg- 

 ment of any given society. It was sound in method in 

 that it stated the social problem not merely as a question 

 of identifying personal interest with public utility, but of 

 reconciling the private conscience with public law. It was 

 wrong in so far as it detached the social from the personal 

 life, set liberty in opposition to order, and treated the rights 

 of individuals as limiting conditions rather than as con- 

 stituent elements of social co-operation. 



